Dear Editor:
Sad to say, most readers will not find this a very welcome epitaph of sorts for the dead in Joplin.
In his landmark book "Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet," Bill McKibben posits the concept that the world we inhabit and depend upon for our very existence has become so different than the former late, great Earth, that it requires a new planetary name: "Eaarth."
"The world hasn't ended, but the world as we know it has," McKibben says. I have not heard one peep anywhere, not on the local news, not on the network news, not in any mainstream print media, connecting the disasters we are experiencing with global warming.
No meteorologist has failed to mention the unique nature of our weather conditions - some of which have toppled all-time records.
Yet not one has tried to connect these facts with any Big Picture.
Two weeks ago CBS had on some NOAA spokesman who actually cautioned against trying to see GW in these local weather patterns. Amazing!
I'm afraid our frogs are cooked. We have long since passed the chance to recognize our plight and jump out of the soon to be boiling pot that is the Earth's emerging disastrous climate.
Not only have we passed the point of averting environmental catastrophe, but we no longer even have the sense to take precautions to live in the changed world our foolishness has created.
Perhaps the all-wise Preserver/Destroyer/Goddess, Gaia will annihilate us and our disastrous capitalist economy by stripping most of us humans off the earth, as She did with the 200-plus deceased citizens of Joplin, using her own resources: floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis.
This may be our only hope: that She strips the land clean of as many of us as possible by "natural" means.
We must begin the difficult process of hardening our hearts to the suffering of the victims of her natural disasters as She shakes off the terrible virus of Humanity that is so hell bent on desecrating Her.
Too late mankind has learned, "It's not nice to fool with Mother Nature."